Abstract: Advances in LED technology combined with solar, storable energy bring light to places remote from electricity grids. Worldwide more than 1.3 billion of people are living off‐grid, often in developing regions of high insect biodiversity. In developed countries, dark refuges for wildlife are threatened by ornamental garden lights. Solar powered LEDs (SPLEDs) are cheaply available, dim, and often used to illuminate foot paths, but little is known on their effects on ground living (epigeal) arthropods.
We used off‐the‐shelf garden lamps with a single ‘white’ LED (colour temperature 7250 K) to experimentally investigate effects on attraction and nocturnal activity of ground beetles (Carabidae).
We found two disparate and species‐specific effects of SPLEDs. (i) Some nocturnal, phototactic species were not reducing activity under illumination and were strongly attracted to lamps (>20‐fold increase in captures compared to dark controls). Such species aggregate in lit areas and SPLEDs may become ecological traps, while the species is drawn from nearby, unlit assemblages. (ii) Other nocturnal species were reducing mobility and activity under illumination without being attracted to light, which may cause fitness reduction in lit areas.
Both reactions offer mechanistic explanations on how outdoor illumination can change population densities of specific predatory arthropods, which may have cascading effects on epigeal arthropod assemblages. The technology may thus increase the area of artificial light at night (ALAN) impacting insect biodiversity.
Measures are needed to mitigate effects, such as adjustment of light colour temperature and automated switch‐offs.

Abstract: Globally, many ecosystems are exposed to artificial light at night. Nighttime lighting has direct biological impacts on species at all trophic levels. However, the effects of artificial light on biotic interactions remain, for the most part, to be determined.
We exposed experimental mesocosms containing combinations of grassland plants and invertebrate herbivores and predators to illumination at night over a 3‐year period to simulate conditions under different common forms of street lighting.
We demonstrate both top‐down (predation‐controlled) and bottom‐up (resource‐controlled) impacts of artificial light at night in grassland communities. The impacts on invertebrate herbivore abundance were wavelength‐dependent and mediated via other trophic levels.
White LED lighting decreased the abundance of a generalist herbivore mollusc by 55% in the presence of a visual predator, but not in its absence, while monochromatic amber light (with a peak wavelength similar to low‐pressure sodium lighting) decreased abundance of a specialist herbivore aphid (by 17%) by reducing the cover and flower abundance of its main food plant in the system. Artificial white light also significantly increased the food plant's foliar carbon to nitrogen ratio.
We conclude that exposure to artificial light at night can trigger ecological effects spanning trophic levels, and that the nature of such impacts depends on the wavelengths emitted by the lighting technology employed.
Policy implications. Our results confirm that artificial light at night, at illuminance levels similar to roadside vegetation, can have population effects mediated by both top‐down and bottom‐up effects on ecosystems. Given the increasing ubiquity of light pollution at night, these impacts may be widespread in the environment. These results underline the importance of minimizing ecosystem disruption by reducing light pollution in natural and seminatural ecosystems.

Abstract: Fishery closures are widely used to promote the sustainability of fish stocks. Fishery agencies typically have very little data relevant to planning closure enforcement actions and evaluating the effectiveness of closures, due in part to the vast expanse and remote nature of many closures. In some cases the effectiveness of closures can be evaluated using data from GPS based beacons, such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) or Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS) installed on fishing boats. In fisheries where few boats are equipped with AIS or VMS, the rating of closures relies on other data sources capable of detecting or inferring fishing activity. One such source comes from low light imaging data collected by the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which can detect fishing boats using lights to attract catch. This is a widely used practice in Asia and several other regions. NOAA has developed an automatic system for reporting the locations of VIIRS boat detections with a nominal 4 h temporal latency. VIIRS boat detection alerts are running for more than 900 fishery closures in the Philippines, with email and SMS transmission modes. These alerts are being actively used in the Philippines to plan enforcement actions and there is a growing list of apprehensions that occurred based on tip-offs from VIIRS. The VIIRS boat detection archive extends back to April 2012. A VIIRS closure index (VCI) has been developed to rate the effectiveness of closures on monthly increments in terms of a percentage. The VCI analysis was performed on three types of closures: an ad hoc fishery closure associated with a toxic industrial discharge, a seasonal fishery closure and a permanent closure in restricted coastal waters. The VCI results indicate that it is possible to rank the effectiveness of different closure, year-to-year differences in compliance levels, and to identify closure encroachments which may warrant additional enforcement effort.

Abstract: In recent years, due to the rapid development of China’s urban, it is significant for effective implementation of urban science development and planning that grasp the process of urban development, analyze the potential of subsequent development, and evaluate the matching degree of the development status and the planning. Thereinto, an effective way we exercise today is to evaluate urban expansion pattern analysis and planning implementation. According to research results of the urban land range extraction method based on the support vector machine (SVM) and fully convolution neural network (FCN) of the depth learning method for the night light image data, this paper describes an integration of remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) and analyzes the urban expansion pattern of Beijing based on the computed results of landscape pattern indices. The results unveil that from 1990s to 2010s, Beijing took on a circle expansion mode on the ground the spatial agglomeration degree gradually increases and the expansion potential has spatial distinctions, which basically meets the requirements of the overall planning.

Abstract: Artificial light at night may affect mortality risk in prey from visually oriented predators because the effect of the artificial light spectrum may differ for a predator’s visual prey detection and for prey evasiveness. To test this, we conducted two types of experiment. First, we assessed the reaction distance and swimming speed of juvenile rudd (Scardinius erythrophthalmus) allowed to forage on juvenile Daphnia pulex × pulicaria under three artificial light sources: halogen, high pressure sodium (HPS), and metal halide bulbs, at the same light intensity. Second, we assessed the evasiveness of D. pulex × pulicaria under the same artificial light sources and in darkness (as a control), in the presence and absence of chemical information on predation risk (kairomones) of juvenile rudd. We found that while both reaction distance and swimming speed of fish was greater under halogen compared to HPS, and similar under metal halide light compared to halogen and HPS, the evasiveness of Daphnia was greater under halogen and HPS-generated light than under metal halide light. The results suggest a possible mismatch of Daphnia’s behavioural response under metal halide light to predicted predation risk, and thus a possible threat to predator–prey balance in a lake ecosystem.